The Historical Fragility of Dutch Corporatism a dissertation overview '

"Every social situation is the heritage of preceding situations and takes over not only their cultures, their dispositions, and their 'spirit', but also elements of their social structure and concentrations of power.... The social pyramid is never made of a single substance, is never seamless. There is no single Zeitgeist, except in the sense of a construct. This means that in explaining any historical course or situation, account must be taken of the fact that much in it can only be explained by the survival of elements that are actually alien to its own trends.... The coexistence of essentially different mentalities and objective facts must form part of any general theory." 1. The Eindhoven Lecture As a senior in high school-to be specific on the 17th of May 1977-I was unexpectedly introduced to the contemporary corporatist debate. On this day, shortly before the Dutch General Elections of the same year, I attended a memorable lecture by the then lame duck prime minister Joop den Uyl, a social-democrat whom I greatly admired. Speaking at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Den Uyl insisted at the outset of his address that he was there neither as the prime minister, nor as the leader of the Dutch social-democratic party, the Partii van de Arbeid, but instead as a 'simple economist from Buitenveldert', his hometown. Den Uyl's self-proclaimed economist's 'objectivity' concealed the value-laden 1 This paper was written during my stay as a Visiting Scholar at CIS/MIT in 1989. I would like to thank Professors Suzanne Berger, Douglas Forsyth and Richard Locke at MIT and Professor Charles Maier at Harvard for their helpful comments and useful suggestions. Amongst my peers I am grateful to Karen Alter, Brian Burgoon and David Miliband for carefully reading the manuscript. 2 stance of what came to be known as the "Eindhoven Lecture" 2. The address was perhaps political in a more emphatic sense than would be true of a political party rally. By deliberately distancing himself from the momentary context of the upcoming elections, Den Uyl affirmed his intent to tackle one of the fundamental problems of the political situation in a non-partisan way. Being primarily addressed to students, as a part of a lecture series on the 'power and impotence of-parliamentary democracy', the speech did have an academic flavour. Still, rereading the lecture after more than a decade, I suspect Den Uyl spoke at Eindhoven less as an …